CEI Today: Pollution & profit-seeking, safe chemicals, and over-regulation

PROFIT-SEEKING –> LESS POLLUTION – FRED L. SMITH, JR.

Forbes: Profits, Despite What You Hear, Do Not Equal Environmental Pollution

Profits do not equal pollution, but still environmentalists carry on a green jihad for increased state control of businesses. While environmentalists realize that firms seek to reduce their costs, they presume that this leads only to dubious practices like midnight dumping. [But environmentalists] fail to understand that market competition turns every cost element … into the focus of intense efforts to translate it into a profit center. Businesses were looking for ways to reduce waste well before the modern environmental movement.

SAFE CHEMICALS – ANGELA LOGOMASINI

Openmarket.org: Retailers Should Keep Consumers — Not Greens — In Mind

As part of its Culture of Alarmism project, the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) has recently launched a coalition letter – which includes CEI — to retailers to combat the greens so-called “Mind the Store“ campaign. We (IWF, CEI, and 21 other groups) advise retailers to ignore radical greens’ advice to remove certain products from store shelves, and instead honor consumer freedom.

The greens’ effort, led by Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, calls on the nation’s top 10 retailers — Walmart, Kroger, Target, Walgreens, Costco, Home Depot, CVS Caremark, Lowe’s, Best Buy, and Safeway –to remove a wide range of useful products from store shelves because they contain one of 101 so-called hazardous chemicals.

COST OF REGULATION – WAYNE CREWS & RYAN YOUNG

Investor’s Business Daily: America’s Soaring Regulations Cost $1.8 Trillion A Year

Politicians from both parties routinely tout the need to roll back unnecessary regulations. But how much overregulation is there exactly? Most politicians have no idea, and neither does the general public.

Most people have some idea that the government spends nearly $4 trillion annually given the prominence of the recent debates over the “fiscal cliff” and “sequestration.”

But there is no equivalent regulatory metric. This is a problem that needs fixing.